1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the field of emergency response and more particularly to a system and method for gathering information at a crisis scene.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Events occur frequently that require emergency response by trained responders. In particular, shooting and hostage taking crises unfortunately occur with regularity. A particularly striking example is the shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton Colo. in April 1999. Here, two young shooters entered the cafeteria and other rooms of the school with semi-automatic weapons and sawed-off shotguns killing indiscriminately. Numerous other shootings in high schools, colleges, fast food restaurants, places of employment and the like occur with regularity. Some examples are the shootings at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University. A particularly recent example is the organized attacks on a hotel and other locations in Mumbai India and two recent school attacks in Germany as well as a gunman attack on a United States Congress Woman in Arizona.
Responders usually are dispatched in response to numerous 911 calls from various people in proximity to the scene. In many cases the callers are excited and do not provide complete or possibly even rational information. Police usually arrive at the scene first. Other responders such as fire, FBI or SWAT teams arrive next. Many times, the police have the scene locked down by then, and there may be a large number of people still in rooms such as classrooms or hotel rooms, and there may be injured victims or fatalities in rooms. Dozens to even hundreds of responders may be present within a short time. The major problem is that, in these first critical moments, nobody really has any reliable information about what exactly happened, how many people are locked inside, how many injured there are, how many fatalities there are, who needs help, how dangerous the situation is, and most important, where the perpetrator or perpetrators are. In addition, there may be an over-abundance of conflicting reports adding to the chaos. To make matters worse, there may be people locked down in rooms with important information and no real way to communicate what they know to the responders. Such lack of intelligence regarding the crisis scene prevents a quick and effective response to neutralize the threat, aid the victims, and bring the situation to an end in an expeditious manner.
Fires, especially fires in large or high-rise buildings or hotels present a similar situation. In this case police and firefighters arrive at the scene possibly not knowing exactly where the fire is in the building or how many people are in rooms or where these people are. Also, they have no way to give instructions to people in the building.
It would be advantageous to have a system and method for getting information at a crisis scene from people who at least partially know what is going on, namely those people inside the scene such as students locked down in classrooms or hotel guests locked down in hotel rooms.
Jacobs et al. in U.S. Pat. No. 5,185,697 teach management in a crisis situation by obtaining information from responders in various positions such as remote units, snipers, etc. Information is compiled into a topic file with time tags. Importantly, Jacobs et al. fail to solve the problem of obtaining information from victims inside the scene.
Ozburn in U.S. published patent application number 2005/0091368 teaches an interactive crisis management system that allows persons needing to be alerted to be automatically alerted by computer. Again, there is no way to get inside information on exactly what is happening.
Lemmon in U.S. published application 2007/0096894 provides event communication keeping all people needing information at a crisis scene up to date on developments.
Larson in U.S. Pat. No. 7,134,088 teaches a computer-based method and system for storing and retrieving tactical information at a crisis scene such as maps, building diagrams and the like. While these are ultimately very useful to responders, they are of no real use early in the situation until some sort of analysis has been made, and plans are being made to solve the problem.
In summary, the prior art does not teach or suggest a way to easily get information from those inside the scene to responders in a reliable and orderly way so that it can be analyzed, compared and used.